Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews Peter Longerich (grave mercy .TXT) 📖

for the East) for the occupied Eastern territories.

What those involved understood at this point by the ‘Final Solution’ within the

Soviet Union, which was yet to be occupied, is not clear. There were no concrete

plans made either for a reservation or for mass murder. Early in 1941 Himmler was

temporarily concerned with the possibility of a mass sterilization of Jews and

asked Victor Brack, who was based in the Chancellery of the Führer and respon-

sible for overseeing ‘euthanasia’, to develop an appropriate plan. When this was

ready at the end of March 1941 he did not pursue the project any further. 168 It seems that the answer to the question of what was to happen to the people to be

deported to the ‘East’ was being postponed to a time after the planned conquest of

the Soviet Union had been achieved. The indifference to the fate of those trans-

ported that this suggests was characteristic of the early deportations into the

General Government and was commensurate with the leadership style of the

National Socialists: at the appropriate time those responsible and actually ‘on

site’ would find some ‘solution’ or other to the new problems that they were faced

with. There are concrete indications from the months before ‘Barbarossa’ that

elements within the National Socialist leadership were arriving at the conclusion

that there would be large-scale deportations ‘to the East’.

Immediately before the attack on the Soviet Union General Governor Frank

explained to Goebbels that he was preparing for the removal of the Jews, as Goebbels

noted in his diary, glossing Frank thus: ‘in the General Government they are already

looking forward to being able to get rid of the Jews. The Jews in Poland are gradually

declining. This is a just punishment for having stirred the population up and for

provoking the war. The Führer has predicted this to the Jews.’169 Remarks that he made to his colleagues on 17 July clarify the source of Frank’s confidence: according

to an assurance given to him by Hitler on 19 June, the Jews would be removed from

the General Government in the foreseeable future which would turn into ‘transit

camps’. 170 Moreover, when the Romanian Head of State, Antonescu, complained to Hitler on 16 August 1941 that German troops had turned back the Bessarabian

Jews that Romanian soldiers had just driven into the Ukraine, he reminded Hitler

that this practice was in stark contrast to ‘the guidelines about the treatment of the

Eastern Jews that the Führer had given him in Munich’. 171 This referred to the meeting of the two leaders in Munich on 13 June 1941.

PART III

MASS EXECUTIONS OF JEWS IN

THE OCCUPIED SOVIET ZONES, 1941

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chapter 10

LAYING THE GROUND FOR A WAR

OF RACIAL ANNIHILATION

From the outset the war against the Soviet Union was conceived as a campaign of

racial domination and annihilation. 1 Victory over the Soviet Union was expected to be rapid, both bringing about a turning point in the progress of the war and at

the same time establishing in Eastern Europe an imperium of living space, or

Lebensraum, for the peoples of the Reich, to be run along lines dictated by racial

ideology.

The long-term aims of the war against the Soviet Union may be summarized in

the following mutually interdependent clusters. First, for the National Socialist

regime, the conquest of the Soviet territories represented the fulfilment of the

Lebensraum programme that had originally been developed in Mein Kampf. It was

the realization of a large-scale ‘eastern settlement’ that had formed part of the

programmatic demands of the right for decades previously. The creation of

settlement space for millions of people was supposed to establish a ‘healthy’

relationship between the land at Germany’s disposal and the number of people

that needed to be accommodated; it was intended to counteract the tendency

towards deracination that Germans had suffered since industrialization and

thereby inaugurate a higher degree of social harmonization. However, the con-

quest of Lebensraum did not merely serve to alleviate the Germans’ alleged urgent

need for territory; on the contrary, it was also intended to form the basis for

180

Mass Executions in Occupied Soviet Zones, 1941

further biological expansion of the ‘Aryan race’ and in that manner to provide the

‘human resources’ for future wars of conquest. 2

The second group of war aims linked the conquest of Lebensraum from the

outset with a ‘policy of unbridled robbery and looting’. 3 It was planned right from the start to feed the troops from the very land they were invading and furthermore

to export agricultural produce back into the Reich. Industry in the Soviet Union

was to be largely closed down, maintaining production only in a series of areas of

interest to Germany, notably in the sphere of raw materials. From the standpoint

of the Nazi leadership, both the confiscation of agricultural produce and the

seizure of raw materials played an important part in securing Germany against

potential blockade and in ensuring that the war against the British Empire could

be successfully sustained over a long period.

At the same time, a third set of war aims planned to use the Eastern campaign

as a means of annihilating ‘Jewish Bolshevism’—that conglomerate, therefore, that

only existed in the distorted vision of the National Socialists, which they saw as

having been formed out of the cooperation of both of Germany’s principal

enemies. The image of ‘Bolshevism as the domination of the Slavic masses in

Soviet Russia by the Jews’ had been one of National Socialism’s ideological

constants since its very earliest days. 4 At the same time, this regime was credited with possessing an almost paradoxical combination of external aggressiveness and

internal weakness: whilst ‘Russian Bolshevism’, in Hitler’s words, represented ‘the

attempt by the Jews to achieve world domination for themselves’, 5 the regime allegedly established in Russia by ‘the Jews’ looked like a house of cards that only

needed to be nudged from the outside for it to collapse. It was precisely this

ambivalent assessment of ‘Jewish Bolshevism’—belligerent on the outside, feeble

on the inside—that offered a form of legitimation for a war in the East that

bordered on self-delusion: from this angle it appeared both as a legitimate

means of self-defence against alleged plans for world domination harboured by

the ‘Jewish Bolsheviks’ and as a historically unique opportunity to conquer a vast

empire with relatively little effort.

A fourth cluster of war aims was focused on